More Gays Need to Get Off Their Asses

As reports are coming in of thousands protesting around the Mormon Temple in Westwood Hollywood today, maybe, just maybe, LGBT Americans are awakening to the fact that they need to get up off their asses, come out of the closet and stop accepting abuse and second class citizenship status. Being nice and hiding from sight will never get us full equality - or at least not for many, many years after several older generations have died off. Our enemies will never give us equality out of the goodness of their hearts - their hearts are too bigoted and hate-filled towards those who are different.

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A few folks are apparently waking up to the reality that the vast majority of gays cannot sit back and leave the work to a small cadre. A column in Huffington Post looks at this problem within the LGBT community. In this area where I live - which is never in the forefront of anything - historically, it is always the same activists who are out fighting in the trenches, often working in multiple organizations. The rest sit home and whine and complain or cower in the closet. This has got to change. Here are some column highlights:

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John Cloud wrote an interesting story in Time Magazine last week about the new gay mafia that is behind lots of the great changes that are going on in American politics. They are smart people who put up hundreds of millions of dollars to change politics and society from the bottom up, working county by county and state by state for equality for gay people.

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One of the gatekeepers for one of the rich donors is quoted as saying, "where is the outrage?" I think he means where is the outrage against being kept as second class citizens, wondering why the "movement" sits back and waits for billionaires to write checks. But can there be outrage when a movement becomes a corporation? When the largest LGBT organizations look like, are staffed by former executives of and are funded by huge corporations and huge donors, where is the movement? It's not at black tie dinners. It's not at VIP receptions. It's not on the red carpet. Movements are visceral and popular, often born of outrage and even anger, like that which eventually made Barack Obama president-elect.

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The Mormon Church and its subsidiary allies brilliantly pumped in money and lies into a cynical campaign to strip rights from people via constitutional amendment. They ran a much better campaign than the No side. And they used their base to win. I talked with two candidates for office here in California today who said they lost because they were on our side. They saw the Mormon Church at work. They saw organizing of Latino and African American households. They saw passion and organization. Where were we?

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Imagine the thousands and thousands of people who could have called, spoken to five friends, walked and persuaded for the past four months. Imgaine what might have happened had we truly engaged our wonderful friends in the labor movement, such as Sal Rosselli. And then, if we had lost, we'd have a real movement. Now we have to build one from Zach and Geoffrey up. Maybe it's all for the best. As Barack Obama has shown, real victories do not come easy, but they do come from movements.